Where's the outrage?

Since Cindy's story on Friday I've been wondering when we might see a Courier editorial on the City talking about charging for customarily 'free' public services like the library and public parks and trails.

They're not free, of course. Our taxes pay for them. Now the City, or at least certain Council members, would charge us again to use them.

The free public library in particular is an American tradition that speaks loudly of our commitment to open government, education, free thought and responsible citizenship. I would think a newspaper editor, of all people, would understand the implications of making access to public information more difficult based on economic class, and say something about it. Something loud.

Format changes

Last week's revamp of the Courier's online offerings are overall very positive, I think.

The sleeker dCourier pages eliminate lots of clutter, fluff and advertising and look more professional, though I would like to see somewhat larger headlines to help distinguish the stories from one another. The home page is still a mess, trying to cram too much in, but it's easy to bypass.

I'm having fun with the new DailyCourierPages.com site, which brings back online pages as printed, following a long hiatus. The navigation and zoom work smoothly and much more quickly than the old version. Zooming in to read takes a little getting used to, as the zoom feature is maybe a little too sensitive to mouse movement, but you get the knack after a while. I'd only ask for a second zoom level for those of us who try to avoid getting too close to the monitor.

On the comments feature, I have to say that "requiring" first and last names, but disclaiming (above it, in red!) that you can use a pseudonym sort of defeats the purpose. Registering commenters with real names will lead to fewer but more responsible comments. You might also consider giving registered commenters pride of place and putting anonymous comments lower, or maybe a larger typeface for registered comments.

Here's a cookie for the IT department. Now marketing gets the challenge of making money on it.

One thing, though: The narrower pages of today's papers make the six-column format hard for readers. The lines are just too short. Go to five and you'll make it easier for your readers and have more interesting layout choices in the bargain.

U.S. debt will keep growing even with economic recovery

I guess the editors missed me over the past week, so to lure me back to my desk, they gave me this great big Monday-morning present, guaranteed to piss me off. They ran a politically charged opinion piece as news.

But wait, there's more. Having chosen this AP op-ed by Tom Raum for a box on 6A, they cut it on both the hard copy and dCourier to eliminate what little balancing information Raum used in favor of the Obama administration. (Sorry, cutting an outside story on the Website, where there is literally no space limitation, is just wrong.) Here's the original story in full.

I can understand it when subtle propaganda works its way into news stories. People often write from unexamined assumptions about the world and don't realize it. But this is far from subtle. The assertions of fact without references, the assertions of other people's motivations, the use of obvious opinions as facts all mark this clearly as an opinion piece. No editor could miss it. This was not a mistake, folks.

Slow blogging this week

I'm having a visit with one of my oldest and dearest friends, so there's not a lot of time for the paper. I notice big unannounced changes in the look of dcourier.com, and I'll have comments on that once I have a chance to get used to it. For now it doesn't seem that the editors are doing anything egregious or particularly interesting this week.

Something's missing -- again

I've been looking for the Courier's coverage of this week's press release from Rep Kirkpatrick on the budget, but nary a word.

It seems that our Mr Tobin can get his press releases printed anytime, but our representative in the big game is only covered when she's being criticized. A local newspaper monopoly ought to do better for us than that.

It's Feed-Your-Head Friday

What's cool about the seventh planet, and lots of talk about its funny name, which could have been George.



This silliness about the pronunciation might be avoided if English-speakers weren't so habitually bad at pronouncing classical words. The Greeks called the mate of Gaia Ouranos, and that was Latinized as Uranus, which in Latin is pronounced "oorahnoos."

Bonus: The Greek creation myth featuring Ouranos as a primordial player is wild and fairly gruesome, a fun read. Before you click through, a trivia question: From what dismembered organ did Aphrodite spring?

Signs of improvement

I've been a little hesitant to say anything that might jinx it, but I've been noticing that copy editing on the Courier has been much better of late. The rampant, glaring typos and embarrassing headlines that have been standard fare in the paper for many years are lately much diminished. I don't know who should get the credit for this, but here's a cookie for whomever you are. I'd love to hear from inside whether there have been relevant policy changes.

Editorial: A 'virtual fence' to nowhere?

The Bush administration's teevee-inspired border boondoggle turns out to be as unworkable as Reagan's "missile defense shield," and we're all just so surprised. But for once the unnamed Courier editor isn't hopping up and down about how the Feds are doing nothing to "control" the border against the illegals who are the root of all evil. While he doesn't really take any position, today he seems relatively thoughtful as he dips a few spoonfuls from the AP story (did this run in the print edition?) and scatters some numbers from 'studies' published by reactionary think-tanks.

Between this and the gun thing on Tuesday, one might wonder whether there's been a change in someone's medication this week.

Horse charity told to redouble efforts to win over neighbors

After years of searching, a charitable nonprofit providing disabled kids and adults with a very special, therapeutic service finds a permanent home, but can't get all the neighbors to sign off. If the comments are any indication, there's going to be some public pressure about this. If you'd like to help, here's the HwH website for a start. They can use it.

I've met with these people and put them on the radio. Their service is terrific and their community spirit is palpable. How anyone could think they and their ten horses wouldn't be the best sort of neighbors is utterly beyond me.

Update, Friday: I see the editor agrees.

Sweat Lodge organizer James Arthur Ray arrested

This is a nice, solid, researched and balanced news story, giving the subject its due without rehashing too much of the play-by-play that we've seen too often before. Lisa gets a cookie.

Editorial: Why do violent felons walk free?

If I read this correctly, the unnamed Courier editor is advocating mandatory life sentences for every violent offense. It would be fascinating to hear the editor argue this in a case of, say, a drunken bar brawl in light of the actual cost of incarceration and the inevitable effect this would have on his taxes.

Public safety matters, but perfect public safety is simply not possible in a nation that values freedom. Criminals will exist, cops and innocent people will be hurt and die, as long as we value our humanity more than imaginary safety. It's part of the price of liberty.

Before lightly dismissing the idea that our culture of adolescent worship of guns and violence might have had anything to do with this problem, the editor asks a few plaintive rhetorical questions demonstrating only his lack of imagination. Were he a journalist, he might have taken a more constructive tack with this and put those questions and others to some of our judges, prosecutors, corrections professionals and maybe a psychologist or social scientist. He might have got a good, informative story out of it. Instead, we get this pitiful waste of space.

Editing note: The editor leaves a crucial fact out of this piece, assuming that everyone knows it: the alleged shooter was in prison here for nearly four years on aggravated assault and related charges (AZ Dept of Corrections). That omission makes his argument nonsensical within the piece.

Editorial: Pearce's gun proposal sounds great to felons

The unnamed Courier editor displays some common sense in protesting Sen. Russell Pearce's attempt to roll back restrictions on firearms, even identifying Pearce correctly as "radical," qualifying for the cookie. I'm grateful that the Courier has lately been consistently applying a more nuanced position on guns than the blind devotion it did previously. It's just too bad the editor's not a little better at journalism, however.

Yesterday, before deadline, the bill passed out of committee carrying amendments addressing the editor's expressed concerns. In other words, the editor wound up writing about a different bill, getting his editorial completely wrong. Here's the update.

This might be just an "oh well,things change" moment, but the readers wind up utterly misled on the content of the legislation, so any input they give their representatives will misfire.

A newspaper editor should understand that the legislative committee process is where a raw bill gets hammered into something the body can vote on, and it's rare that a bill doesn't change substantially in the process. In Arizona it's relatively easy to find out online when a bill is being considered in which committee, and the state offers streaming real-time video of many committee hearings. It's not like the editor couldn't know what was going on.

A skilled journalist would have either published this before the committee process, when constituents still had time to weigh in on the raw bill, or held his fire until the bill was out of all committees and appeared on the floor agenda. On this the editor jumped the gun. (Sorry, sometimes I can't resist.)

Will we perhaps see a followup on the current bill?

Editorial: Make better use of 'call to public'

Befitting the regular Monday dump of press releases on the front page, here the unnamed Courier editor takes on a topic of kindergarten complexity -- public comments at City Council meetings -- and manages to live up to the challenge by saying pretty much nothing.

Windbags are a professional hazard of public meetings, and we have to face the fact that these opportunities exist every bit as much for the windbags as for anyone else.

Windbags do what they do because they don't feel they're being heard, either by the public officials they're addressing or by others in their daily lives. The only good way to reduce incidents of windbaggery is to build and resolutely reinforce a culture of caring respect, so people clearly understand that the officials aren't using the Council table as a wall between higher and lower classes, while reinforcing respect for the time of everyone in the room. But Council members must accept that windbaggery will happen on occasion, and they're drawing their pay in large part to put up with precisely that. Skilled leaders know that just expressing that they care to hear what the windbag is saying will reduce windbaggery by 20% out of the gate, and other leadership techniques can help a poor communicator get to the heart of what he wants to say and step down.

Even when those don't work, it's far better to have Council and the public put up with a windbag than to have the Mayor gaveling people off the podium to avoid hearing what they're saying, and the difference between worthwhile speech and windbaggery is in the ear of the beholder. The First Amendment does not say "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, unless it's boring or takes too long." Council must bear in mind at all times that they are elected to serve the public, not the other way around.

Note to editor: Where you wrote, "the presiding officer has the right to reign in a speaker," that should be "rein in." Given all the Western movies you so love to quote and our town's cowboy reputation, your readers expect you to know a little more about the terminology.

It could have happened

Editorial: High-speed rail won't make enough impact

Today the Courier extends its reputation for hipshooting into the area of transportation policy.

The unnamed Courier editor poo-poohs the paltry 13 billion clams the President is proposing for high-speed rail as inadequate to the task of building a national high-speed rail network. Of course, no one has promised any such thing. From the WSJ:

"Building a high-speed rail network like the one in Western Europe would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but Mr. Obama called the $13 billion effort 'a first step.'"

Perhaps the editor does not quite understand that a first step is necessary to getting anywhere at all. I'm sure he wouldn't be applauding the President if he proposed spending, say, $250 billion on high-speed rail over the next ten years -- a little less than we've already spent on the war in Afghanistan. But no, in the reactionary mind a step forward, if taken by Democrats, becomes a half-measure.

The editor is also miffed that the plan doesn't include us mountain states. (I have to wonder where the editor was when our genius city fathers decided it was a good idea to rip out our local rail line and sell off the land, but never mind.)

From The New York Times:

"The government has identified 10 corridors, each from 100 to 600 miles long, with greatest promise for high-speed development. They are: a northern New England line; an Empire line running east to west in New York State; a Keystone corridor running laterally through Pennsylvania; a major Chicago hub network; a southeast network connecting the District of Columbia to Florida and the Gulf Coast; a Gulf Coast line extending from eastern Texas to western Alabama; a corridor in central and southern Florida; a Texas-to-Oklahoma line; a California corridor where voters have already approved a line that will allow travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two and a half hours; and a corridor in the Pacific Northwest."

There's a reason it's called "mass transit" -- it's designed for lots of people to use. Look at the graphic, editor: the lines are where the people are. The city of New York by itself has half again as many people in it than the entire state of Arizona. You want bang for your tax buck, right?

Once again the editor parrots the talking points of the reactionary right without analyzing them or bothering to try to understand what he's criticizing. My best advice to him: stick to your knitting and keep it local, where you have at least a chance of knowing what you're talking about.

Side note: All the facts and a lot of the actual writing in the editorial are lifted from Mark Clayton in the Christian Science Monitor. (Note to editor: Unattributed copying of another's work is known in the trade as plagiarism.)

Update, 11:30pm: I sent part of this piece as a comment on the editorial, and it appears the Courier editor flushed it without a trace. Classy, boys. That sort of behavior is why I keep this blog.

Update, Monday night: Documenting my charge above before the stories roll off into the Nethernet:

CSM: President Obama’s $8 billion plunge into 13 high-speed rail projects nationwide has the potential to become either his “Eisenhower moment” – moving the US into a new phase of transportation modernization – or just a dead end “drop in the bucket."

Courier: On Wednesday, President Barack Obama spoke about a federal spending freeze, but not until 2011. The next day he unveiled parts of the second stimulus, including $8 billion toward high-speed rail projects. It will be either his "Eisenhower moment" - moving the country into a new phase of transportation - or just a "drop in the bucket." ... What Obama is doing as a substitute will result only in a dead end.


CSM: “It really is only a drop in the bucket of what the nation will need to get the kind of high-speed rail network it needs,” says Jack Schenendorf, who was vice chairman of the a blue-ribbon commission that studied the nation’s transportation needs in a 2008 study. “Obviously, for high speed rail, it is a good development. But it will take a lot more money to get these systems built out.”

Courier: "It really is only a drop in the bucket of what the nation will need to get the kind of high-speed rail network it needs," said Jack Schenendorf, who was vice chairman of the a blue-ribbon commission that studied the nation's transportation needs in a 2008 study. "Obviously, for high-speed rail, it is a good development. But it will take a lot more money to get these systems built out."

See where our editor even cribbed a typo? Cut-and-paste for sure. Naughty boy.

Update, 11pm Monday: Well, well, well, there are situations in which the editors will stoop to correcting mistakes online! An anonymous commenter alerts me that the editorial has been changed, sometime in the last four hours, adding attribution of the copied bits to the CSM. Pity he didn't get the typo while he was at it. Must've been in a hurry.

Letter: Equality must apply to everyone

Just read this great letter that cuts to the bone.

Editorial: Officials try to work around voters' will

I've been thinking about this one since it went up, but haven't had time to get to it.

The editor blasts legislators for having the unmitigated gall to try and walk back laws that "the people" gave us by initiative. He's talking yet again about term limits, his second editorial on the subject in three days. This writer wonders whether he'd be as protective of an initiative he doesn't like so much, but let's leave that aside for the moment. There's plenty of stupid here to deal with already.

His argument is that "the voters have spoken" on term limits -- 18 years ago -- and while he doesn't refute that "they deprive lawmakers of institutional knowledge and give too much influence to aides and lobbyists," to him that decision is carved in stone, apparently because it is infallible. Like the Pope.

He tries to reinforce this with Rep Tobin's aborted move to reintroduce as a bill the payday-loan industry's failed initiative of a year and a half ago. The editor sees a parallel there that evades me.

"A government by the people is supposed to be one in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them," says the editor, citing a principle of American civics that as far as I can tell he made up on the spot. Our system is not direct democracy, that doesn't exist anywhere. In representative government, supreme power is indeed vested in the people, but it is by design not exercised by them.

Our little direct-democracy option, the initiative process, was designed and built well over a century ago, and acts like it. It's primitive, allowing nefarious players to take advantage of us in many ways, and it's morphing into government by advertising. The idea that "the people" are behind most initiatives is either blindly naive or actively malicious. The idea that a few sentences scrawled on a bar napkin can pass through the initiative process and become good law is plain stupid, and most initiatives really are nearly that poorly vetted.

But the crux of the editor's argument is that "the people" can't be wrong in passing through these things. We've given term limits 18 years to prove out, and what we see is growing ignorance, disorganization, disarray and even corruption in our legislative bodies as a direct result. The state is functionally bankrupt, our Accidental Governor is trying to get her way by screaming at people, and our amateur Legislature is arranging duckpins on the poopdeck of the Titanic and thinking about a nice lunch. It's past time to repair this crucial mistake and start rebuilding our political culture.

The real 'duh' moment here is at the end, where the editor implies that the Legislature will pass this through the regular process and "the people" won't get to vote on it. The bill in process is a concurrent resolution, which if passed will result in a ballot measure. There's no other legal way to get around an established initiative. A newspaper editor ought to know these things.

Your political future

Mills sets up website in run for governor

It's funny, I must have missed the Courier stories about the candidacies of Dean Martin, Terry Goddard and the other front-runners for actual nomination. But we get the press release from our semi-local gun god verbatim as a news story. I have a feeling we know how this is going to go in everybody's hometown newspaper.

Embattled Obama declares in speech, 'I don't quit'

I've got just one thing to say about this AP story: In eight years of unending public controversy, the Courier never once associated the word "embattled" with George W Bush. Just sayin'.